Sticking with books
January 10th 2008 00:51
I’ve just begun reading Philip Jenkins’ God’s Continent Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis. It’s the sort of book I start with enthusiasm but then tend to drop when something else more easy to read comes along. Mr Jenkins has a great enthusiasm for quoting everyone in sight in terms of his arguments, which makes me suspect he has a very good research team to back up his work, rather like James Michener used to. It was the only way he could get his great fat novels off the ground.
Mr Jenkins’ team of workers must be very adept, as the text is littered with footnotes (as I’ve mentioned on my other blog, Webitz.net). These researchers must be pertinacious in their approach to research as they seem to have picked up every possible reference to the subject in sight.
My aim is to read the book right through (more than half the books I start never get past the half way mark or less – including the most recent one I thought would be great called Reading Lolita in Tehran), but even if I don’t I’ll have already learnt half a dozen new words, two of which I’ve remembered: dhimmitude and Eurosecularity. Ain’t they great?
As regards the first, I refer you to a very good piece on Wikipedia, which explains the derivation and meaning of the word. Essentially a dhimmi is a second-class Muslim, though in order to explain this the writer on Wikipedia chooses to use the word neologism in the first clause of his sentence, which I also had to look up!
Mr Jenkins’ team of workers must be very adept, as the text is littered with footnotes (as I’ve mentioned on my other blog, Webitz.net). These researchers must be pertinacious in their approach to research as they seem to have picked up every possible reference to the subject in sight.
My aim is to read the book right through (more than half the books I start never get past the half way mark or less – including the most recent one I thought would be great called Reading Lolita in Tehran), but even if I don’t I’ll have already learnt half a dozen new words, two of which I’ve remembered: dhimmitude and Eurosecularity. Ain’t they great?
As regards the first, I refer you to a very good piece on Wikipedia, which explains the derivation and meaning of the word. Essentially a dhimmi is a second-class Muslim, though in order to explain this the writer on Wikipedia chooses to use the word neologism in the first clause of his sentence, which I also had to look up!
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